This is the second in our three-part 2019 digital storage projection blog series. This part looks at 2018 trends and future developments in solid state storage, memory and fundamental computer architectures.

You know you’ve made it when you get your own show. The fact that there’s a show dedicated to NVM Express (NVMe) next month solidifies an industry-wide sentiment that the host controller interface and storage protocol hit a tipping point in the last year.

As adoption of solid-state drives (SSDs) increases in enterprise, professional, and consumer markets, the practice of shimming flash memory onto interfaces and form factors designed for traditional mechanical hard drives for the sake of cross-compatibility is falling out of style.

It’s no surprise that NVMe speed is impressive: A blue-ribbon consortium of storage and server vendors developed NVMe as a high-performance interface specification that accelerates NAND SSDs using the PCIe bus.

Women who have been involved in the annual Flash Memory Summit (FMS) started Superwomen in Flash networking events four years ago to promote and celebrate the success of women in the memory/storage industry, and with the goal of encouraging more women to enter and succeed in the storage industry.

The nonvolatile memory express specification, developed to maximize the benefits of flash-based storage, has evolved quickly and significantly since it was a gleam in the storage industry’s eyes in the mid-2000s.

IBM has an answer for some of the biggest trends in enterprise data storage – including Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), artificial intelligence, multi-cloud environments and containers – and it comes in a 2U package.

This week, Industry Outlook asks David Woolf, Senior Engineer of Datacenter Technologies at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), about NVMe and NVMe-oF and their role in storage and the data center.

When it comes to storage, this new year certainly won’t be boring. A number of technologies and market movements have been percolating over the past few years and will reach full steam in 2018—impacting the landscape for enterprise suppliers and enterprise buyers alike.

Following on the heels of a major specification update and its eighth annual plug fest, NVM Express is poised to have a busy year as it continues to develop the base NVMe specification while expanding the NVMe Management Interface (NVMe-MI) specification and one for accessing SSDs on a PCIe bus over fabrics.

The storage industry was on a roller coaster in 2017, with the decline of traditional SAN gear offset by enterprise interest in hyperconverged infrastructure, software-only solutions, and solid-state drives.

Five years ago, flash technology transformed the storage market forever. Today, flash-first arrays are the new normal. Will a new shared storage access protocol called nonvolatile memory express over fabrics combined with the advent of storage class memory prove as disruptive to traditional storage over the next five years as NAND flash technology was in the recent past?

As the sun sets on 2017 — and rises over 2018 — we once again present the technologies and trends in data storage that we think will shine brightest and have the most sway over data centers in the coming year. It’s time for Hot Techs 2018!

Hyperconvergence is on a roll. Enterprises are shifting storage investments from legacy architectures to software-defined systems in an effort to achieve greater agility, easier provisioning and lower administrative costs.

NVM-Express isn’t new. Development on the interface, which provides lean and mean access to non-volatile memory, first came to light a decade ago, with technical work starting two years later through a work group that comprised more than 90 tech vendors.

Whether the servers running your company’s applications are on your developers’ desks, in your data center, or in your private cloud, the technologies inside the racks are what enable—or throttle—application speed, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.

Flash storage has radically changed the IT landscape. While the most obvious benefit is improved application performance, Enterprise Strategy Group research shows flash users have experienced improved reliability and resource utilization, as well as reduced TCO.

Despite what you may have read, the biggest and most important meta-trend in the IT business isn’t cloud computing. It’s not so-called “digital transformation,” and it’s not big data analytics. Nor is it software-defined anything.

Flash, NVMe, and storage-class memory like Intel’s Optane are speeding up storage significantly, and they’re a good fit for the workloads that are driving the greatest demand for storage, such as containers, big data, machine learning, and hyperconverged infrastructure, all of which use file and object storage rather than the block storage of SANs.

32GB solid state drives (SSDs) are already sampling and 50TB and 100TB are expected next year. The new 3D NAND process, coupled with in-chip die stacking, is increasing the capacity per chip at a tearaway pace. New form factors are being checked out.

The latest release of a non-volatile memory interface and storage protocol emphasizes the enterprise shift to analytics, virtualization and other data-intensive workloads while riding the coat tails of the robust solid-state storage sector.

NVM Express, Inc., the organization that developed the industry standard NVM Express (NVMe™) specification for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe®) bus as well as across Fabrics, today announced the completion and release of its NVMe 1.3 specification.

If we go back to 2009, the work to define NVM Express (NVMe) had just begun, and around that same time, Microsoft Azure made its first major purchase of Serial ATA (SATA) based solid-state drives (SSDs) to help accelerate its storage servers by offloading the storage commit log.

NVM Express, the special interest group behind the NVMe protocol, which enables significantly higher performance on flash-based storage devices, compared to the AHCI protocol, published the NVMe 1.3 specification.